Russia said on Tuesday that Ukraine had struck its territory again with U.S.-supplied missiles, just as the Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia had unleashed an immense air assault overnight that involved nearly 200 drones.
The attacks were the latest in a series of intensifying air assaults between the two countries in recent days, in a sudden escalation that has shifted the focus away from ground assaults to a Cold War-style missile brinkmanship.
The Russian defense ministry claimed that Ukraine had used more than a dozen U.S.-delivered missiles known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, to strike its territory twice, on Saturday and Monday. That followed a Ukrainian attack involving the same missiles last week, the first time Ukraine had used the longer-range weapons to strike in Russia since the United States granted permission earlier this month.
That strike prompted Russia to respond by test firing an intermediate-range missile designed to deliver nuclear weapons, though it was not armed with nuclear warheads.
The Russian defense ministry said in a statement that the Ukrainian ATACMS strikes on Saturday and Monday had been partly successful, damaging military infrastructure and wounding some soldiers in the western Kursk region. It was an unusual admission — Russia typically says it intercepts all the missiles fired at it — that could serve as a pretext for strong retaliation.
Moscow said it was preparing “retaliatory actions” to the latest attacks. The Ukrainian Army declined to comment about the attack in an email. Military experts said that videos of the Monday strikes that were shared on social media strongly suggested that it involved ATACMS.
The tit-for-tat air attacks have raised fears about the direction the conflict could take, with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia threatening nuclear strikes in a bellicose address last Thursday.
But Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Ukraine had much to gain by targeting Russian territory, which Moscow has long used as a rear base for launching air assaults and preparing ground offensives.
“Ukraine not falling for Putin’s saber-rattling makes a lot of sense,” Mr. Karako said. “They keep shooting.”
Military analysts say neither side has enough of the respective missiles to fundamentally alter the course of the war, which Russia is currently dominating with relentless assaults in eastern Ukraine, while also clawing back territory that Ukraine had captured in the Kursk region of southern Russia.
A video of the Monday attack verified by The New York Times showed a constellation of explosions near an airfield in Kursk, about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border. The explosions were consistent, analysts said, with impacts of cluster munitions, which are multiple bomblets packed in shells that disperse before impact.
Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the distinctive impacts and range of the strike appeared to corroborate that ATACMS missiles carrying cluster warheads — a weapon supplied to Ukraine by the United States — were used in the attack.
John Kirby, a national security spokesman at the White House, confirmed on Monday that Ukraine had already used the missiles to strike inside Russia, including in the Kursk region, but did not specify when or where they were used.
Russia’s defense ministry reported that in Monday’s attack, five missiles were fired, with two hitting their targets, damaging a radar installation and causing casualties among military personnel. In the other attack on Saturday, involving eight missiles, one reached its target, while fragments injured two servicemen and damaged infrastructure, the ministry said.
On Tuesday, ambassadors from Ukraine and NATO’s member states met at Ukraine’s request to discuss the security situation after Russia’s use of the experimental intermediate-range missile, which was fired at the city of Dnipro, in central Ukraine. The strike caused little damage, but it raised alarm in Ukraine at a time when Moscow has been elevating threats of nuclear war.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly asked allies to send them more air-defense missiles, and senior Ukrainian military officials briefed the ambassadors via video link. During the meeting, NATO said in a statement, “allies reaffirmed their support for Ukraine.”
The statement repeated the assertion by NATO’s spokesperson, Farah Dakhlallah, that Russia’s use of such a missile would “neither change the course of the conflict nor deter NATO allies from supporting Ukraine.”
But months of Russian air assaults have depleted Ukraine’s air defenses, allowing more and more drones to break through Ukrainian cities.
A prime example came on Tuesday, with the Ukrainian Air Force saying that Russia had launched 188 attack drones against the country overnight, a record number in the war so far.
The air force added that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the air force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
Russia’s military has attacked Ukrainian cities with waves of drones almost every night since September in a campaign that analysts say is intended to test and wear down air defenses. The drones have also targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a renewed effort to plunge the population into cold and darkness as winter sets in.
The overnight drone assault, however, stood out for its sheer scale and was the latest example of the tit-for-tat air attacks that have punctuated the war over the past week.
Russian drones have increasingly penetrated central Kyiv, home to government administration buildings and the presidential palace. The once rare buzz of drones flying overhead at night and the rat-tat-tat of heavy machine guns trying to take them down now echo regularly through the heart of the capital.
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